tmost store,
We loved and laboured, lo, we are no more,'
And thy fond heart in fealty to our clay
Fail in allegiance to the name we bore.
Go, seek thy kinsman, to a brother's hand
I gave possession of a gem more fair,
More costly far than gold, than rubies rare,
Thy part and heritage, of him demand
Its just bestowal, and with dauntless tread
Pursue the pathway of thy holy dead."

When the old Sikh had ceased speaking, he lay greatly exhausted. The
night deepened. It was a remote spot. Now and then the sound of
trampling feet or the tread of a horse climbing the difficult road
reached the ear. The hours were long and dreary, but they passed.
Morning dawned, and Atma found himself alone. He had known that it would
be so, and yet it came with the sharpness of an unexpected blow. He
mourned, and, as is the way with mourners, he accused himself from hour
to hour of having failed in duty to the departed during his lifetime.
Looking on the face of the dead, he wondered much where the spirit that
so lately had seemed to be with the frame but a single identity, one and
indivisible, had fled. He recalled his father's words,

"Upward or down, or toward the setting sun,
None knows,"

and with the recollection, the sense of loss deepened. An old cry rose
to his lips, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him!"

The words by which his father had sought to comfort him still sounded in
his hearing, but Grief is stronger than Wisdom. Human speech is the
least potent of forces, and arguments that clash and clang bravely in
the tournament of words, slaying shadows, and planting the flag of
triumph over fallen fancies, on entering the lists to combat the fact of
Death, but beat the air, and their lusty prowess only fetches a laugh
from out of the silence.

CHAPTER III.

After his father's death Atma betook himself to Lahore, where dwelt
Lehna Singh, only brother of the departed Sikh. A man of a totally
different cast of mind, he had early adopted a commercial life, and now,
in the enjoyment of a vast fortune, yet undiminished by the
contingencies of war, lived in luxury and opulence, his dwelling
thronged by Sikhs whose possessions, unlike his own, had melted away in
the national catastrophe. The fact of his house being the rendezvous of
a discontented faction did not escape British vigilance, the more so as
Lehna Singh was one of the eight sirdars appointed to sit in c